Red Headed Woodpeckers: I Love These Birds Even When They Drive Me Nuts!

The red headed woodpecker is one of my absolute favorite birds. I think I like them so much because they are the perfect combination of stunning beauty with a bad attitude that guys find irresistible.

Red headed woodpeckers are interesting in that they always attract tremendous attention from bird watchers but not much is actually known about them. I did a little research and came up with some interesting facts and observations about these beautiful birds.

My Personal History With Red Headed Woodpeckers

I am fortunate to have some nesting pairs of these birds in the woods behind my house. I still get a thrill every time one of them lands on one of my woodpecker feeders or even flies through the yard.

They also aggravate the heck out of me!

When they visit one of my peanut feeders like the one pictured above they decide to get picky. I have watched one of these birds pick up ten different peanuts and toss each one onto the ground before finally finding one that it wanted to eat.

Really? Are peanuts that different from each other?

These birds are also pretty noisy at times. My neighbor has metal flashing over his chimney and there is one red head who loves to sit there and bang his beak on the chimney like there is no tomorrow. When the woodpecker is banging on that chimney it sounds like there is a machine gun going off in the neighborhood!

Basic Facts About These Birds

The folks over at Peterson Field Guides published a very informative video about the red headed woodpecker that has some basic facts and how it compares to other woodpeckers like the red bellied and yellow sapsucker. The video isn’t too long and is worth a watch!

If you want to see some close up action of these birds at a suet feeder you can watch this video and listen to its call. The call of a red head sounds a heck of a lot like the sounds squirrels make. In fact, every time I watch the video with the sound turned up my dogs go NUTS looking for the squirrels.

The lack of extensive studies on such a beautiful bird stems form two issues. The first is that the nesting locations for these birds are often extremely difficult to reach making the physical studies challenging to perform. The second is that the population of these birds has dropped dramatically making them scarce for observations.

The population of the red headed woodpecker dropped 2% per year from 1966 to 2014 resulting in an overall population decline of 70%. This population decline has landed the red headed woodpecker on the IUCN Red List of animals that are at risk of becoming endangered.

Reasons for the decline of this bird are not firmly established but some of the suspects include:

Red heads are among the few species of woodpeckers that cache food for later consumption. Red heads love acorns, berries and flying insects. They have been described as being the most omnivorous of all of the woodpeckers.